June

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — After a year of door knocking and organizing, neighborhood activists who have joined forces with the union organizing drive at Yale New Haven Hospital decided it was time to hold a community-wide solidarity event. The result was a May 21 rally and concert for “Our Community, Our Jobs, Our Hospital,” which brought together over 2,500 people to demand the hospital administration respect the needs of the people of this city.

WASHINGTON — House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) was so enraged by a witness from Amnesty International USA, who linked the Patriot Act to torture at secret U.S. detention facilities around the world, that he gaveled a June 10 hearing to an end. He ordered microphones turned off and stormed out of the hearing room.

CHICAGO — Twenty-eight years ago, in the midst of a political storm, the Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center organized the first Puerto Rican People’s Day Parade here. The parade was the PRCC’s organized response to the brutal 1977 killing of two young Puerto Ricans at the hands of racist white policemen, an event that triggered a community-wide rebellion on the city’s near northwest side.
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Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. The celebration marks the events of June 19 (“Juneteenth”), 1865, when Union General Gordon Grangergy read the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, Texas, effectively freeing over a quarter million enslaved Blacks in the state.

The heartland of America skipped a beat June 6 when Rick Wagoner, chairman and CEO of General Motors, announced plans to eliminate 25,000 jobs. A few days later the corporation gave the United Auto Workers until the end of the month to accept savage cutbacks in health benefits for 1.1 million active and retired workers and their families.
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